Will Larson @Lethain Twitter profile

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Will Larson

4 years

A lot of folks want a map to Staff Engineer, and just as many Staff Engineers want to better understand their role. Towards that end, I'm working on a small project to collect folks' stories of reaching and operating as staff-plus engineers

Stories of reaching Staff-plus engineering roles - StaffEng

Stories of folks reaching Staff Engineer roles.

staffeng.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

2 years

"What should I measure when the CEO asks for engineering metrics?" is probably the most frequently recurring eng leadership question, and connects into a larger, somewhat nebulous topic: how should you measure engineering organizations? Some notes!

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Will Larson

@Lethain

7 years

This has been a terrible, staggering year in so many ways. It's also been a disproportionately interesting and meaningful year for me professionally, and I wanted to share some of what I learned in 2017 about engineering and infrastructure management.

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

In preparation for starting a new role next week, I had some convos with folks in those roles, did some research and have written up what you should focus on for your first 90 days as a VP Engineering or CTO

Your first 90 days as CTO or VP Engineering.

Whenever I transition to a new opportunity, I think about how to “start well.” How can I ramp up as effectively as possible? How do I balance the urge to “show value” immediately with making the...

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

2 years

Congrats to @whereistanya for writing this excellent book into existence! Super excited for this book and all the not-yet-written books expanding on the staff+ role

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Will Larson

@Lethain

2 years

Pulled together the "work related" books I read over the past four years. With ⭐ next to the ones I still think about somewhat frequently!

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

Early edition of "Staff Engineer" is available tomorrow. If you didn't buy "An Elegant Puzzle," this is *your* chance to get premium typos, grammatical errors, and diagrams with confusingly reversed arrows, but about Staff-plus engineering instead of mgmt

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Will Larson

@Lethain

6 years

If I had to pick one story had summed up my early career in Silicon Valley, it would have to be the ill-fated launch of Digg v4, sometimes thoughtfully described as the worst relaunch of a product, ever. Now you too can read the story:

Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity.

Digg was having a rough year. Our CEO left the day before I joined. Senior engineers ghosted out the door, dampening productivity and pulling their remaining friends. We had only one remaining shot...

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

What are best resources on becoming/being/operating as staff-plus engineer? Looking for more stuff like (thread):

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

Last proof copy arrived and the cover and QR codes are all looking good (made the cover in Omnigraffle, lol)

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Will Larson

@Lethain

7 months

First prints have arrived in my hands as of three minutes ago!

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

If you were interviewing a bunch of staff/principal/distinguished engineers, what questions would you ask them?

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Will Larson

@Lethain

2 years

Once again, I am coming to you with a soup-to-nuts writeup on engineering strategy. Wrote an example eng strat, structuring strat in general, structuring eng strategy in particular, and how to evaluate specific strategy components. It's a lot.

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Will Larson

@Lethain

1 year

Starting a new engineering executive role on Monday. What’s your best advice? Stories preferred!

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Will Larson

@Lethain

7 years

A core management skill is bridging between your management’s and your team’s expectations in a way that is authentic to both’s values. If you never say no to your team, you’re not actually managing them. If you never change your management’s mind, you’re not being a manager.

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Will Larson

@Lethain

6 years

Software migrations are a way of life at rapidly growing companies, and increasingly I think your ability to migrate effectively is the defining constraint for your growth.

Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt.

Migrations are both essential and frustratingly frequent as your codebase ages and your business grows: most tools and processes only support about one order magnitude of growth before becoming...

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

7 months

It took me a long time to capture the idea concisely, but finally found way to talk about tradeoffs in a useful way, especially why some folks see tradeoffs everywhere, and others believe tradeoffs are rare: good tradeoffs are multi-dimensional.

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

Few eng orgs have clear engineering strategies, they can feel almost mythical & intimidating to write. While struggling myself, I’ve landed on a reproducible way to write useful strategies: five 5 design docs, synthesize them into 1 strategy, repeat!

Write five, then synthesize: good engineering strategy is boring.

Few companies understand their engineering strategy and vision. One consequence of this uncertainty is the industry belief that these documents are difficult to write. In some conversations it can...

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

11 months

Although I'm quite convinced that I'll always be a writer first and a conference speaker second (or third or tenth), decided to record a quick cut of the same slides I gave at QCon a few weeks ago.

Solving the Engineering Strategy Crisis

This is a recording of the final version of my talk, Solving the Engineering Strategy Crisis, originally delivered at QCon SF 2023.Blog: https://lethain.com/...

www.youtube.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

10 months

Congrats @GergelyOrosz

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

This post on making big technical changes at Slack by @johnnyrodgersis and @keithmadams is sublime. This is what technology strategy looks like.

How Big Technical Changes Happen at Slack - Slack Engineering

Most new things in technology turn out to be fads: patterns of talking and doing that come and go without leaving a permanent mark. Microkernels; EPIC architectures like IA-64; object request...

slack.engineering

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Will Larson

@Lethain

2 years

As someone who is routinely annoyed by org value statements ("Integrity!"), I've written up my approach to writing useful values, particularly from an engineering org's perspective, make them: (1) reversible, (2) applicable, and (3) honest. Full notes at

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

Excited to share @ksylor 's story of becoming a frontend architect at @Etsy . A lot of folks believe that you gotta go into infrastructure or systems to reach staff roles, and Katie's exp is an important counter-example, along with being a delightful intrvw

Katie Sylor-Miller - Frontend Architect at Etsy

Stories of folks reaching Staff Engineer roles.

staffeng.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

2 years

Everywhere I've worked, people have complained that internal communication could be better. There is an art to delightful internal comms, but doing a reasonably good job bakes down to mechanically following a few fairly simple practices. Full notes in

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Will Larson

@Lethain

3 months

Will pull apart into a more useful thread tomorrow, but some notes on creating software quality. It’s hard to get right if you don’t disambiguate three distinct barriers to quality: essential problem domain, scale, and accidental complexities

How to create software quality.

I’ve been reading Steven Sinofsky’s Hardcore Software, and particularly enjoyed this quote from a memo discussed in the Zero Defects chapter: You can improve the quality of your code, and if you do,...

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

As “Do titles matter?” does the rounds again, the StaffEng take is... of course it matters, especially to folks who don’t look like the stereotypical concept of a Staff Engineer

Does the title even matter?

Stories of folks reaching Staff Engineer roles.

staffeng.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

10 months

What are your preferred books, blog posts or case studies about engineering strategy? Pulling together my thoughts on this topic and looking to understand the prior art. Collection thus far in

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

A friend and I are playing around with the idea of doing a small site where we answer anonymous engineering leadership questions ("eng leadership" meaning org, people, structural, process questions, but not technology questions). Do you have a question? If so...

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

With more remote-first orgs, do you evaluate for written communication in your hiring process, and if so, how?

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

It's surprisingly common for folks in technology to view their career as transient, and working in industry it's easy to take on aspects of that perspective. I've spent some time thinking how I'd approach my career if I emphasized longevity and growth.

A forty-year career.

The Silicon Valley narrative centers on entrepreneurial protagonists who are poised one predestined step away from changing the world. A decade ago they were heroes, and more recently they’ve become...

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

How do you, as a Staff-plus, or any other similar senior individual contributor role, wish your manager approached managing you differently than they approach managing folks in less senior roles? Have some draft ideas but would love to hear more!

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Will Larson

@Lethain

6 years

A list and summaries of many of my favorite technical papers: Dynamo, Hints for Compute System Design, Big Ball of Mud, The Google File System, On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Systems, Borg/Omega/Mesos, Raft/Paxos, etc!

Some of my favorite technical papers.

I’ve long been a fan of hosting paper reading groups, where a group of folks sit down and talk about interesting technical papers. One of the first steps to do that is identifying some papers worth...

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

3 years

Moving day!

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Will Larson

@Lethain

8 months

Seeing across different layers of context is one of the hard skills to learn as a Staff-plus engineer. It's also the only way to consistently get access to company-scoped problems rather than team-scoped ones. Some notes:

Layers of context.

Recently I was chatting with a Staff-plus engineer who was struggling to influence his peers. Each time he suggested an approach, his team agreed with him, but his peers in the organization disagreed...

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

1 year

Pulled together slides and talking notes for upcoming talk at QCon in SF, which internally I'm thinking of as "Solving the Engineering Strategy Crisis" although that is indeed not it's official name.

Solving the Engineering Strategy crisis.

These are speaking notes for my October 4th, QCon talk in San Francisco. See a video of this talk. Slides for this talk. Over the course of my career, I’ve frequently heard from colleagues, team...

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

So, very, very excited to have An Elegant Puzzle up for pre-order. Can't wait for folks to start reading it.

Stripe Press

@stripepress

5 years

"I've come to view engineering management as a series of puzzles. This book is a collection of those puzzles which I have had the good fortune to struggle with and learn from." - @lethain An Elegant Puzzle is now available for pre-order.

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

Still editing and finishing prep, but it is def coming!

Padmïni

@ppyapali

4 years

. @Lethain 's book, Staff Engineer is a must-read for eng leaders: IC or manager. In addition to demystifying the staff role, it covers the whys and hows of tech strategy, the power of sponsorship & the responsibility of having influence. Pre-order here:

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Will Larson

@Lethain

7 months

Engineering Executive’s primer is off to print!

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

Quarantining so hard that our car battery died.

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Will Larson

@Lethain

2 years

Having gone through the "infrastructure costs don't matter" to "infrastructure costs are on fire" to "we know what we're doing and no one is yelling at me anymore" cycle a few times, wrote up what I've learned about managing infrastructure costs

Efficiency: Managing Infrastructure Costs

In my early career roles, I worked at companies that never worried about their infrastructure costs at all. They were simply too low a cost and growing too slowly for the Finance team to pay much...

infraeng.dev

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Will Larson

@Lethain

2 years

New Staff-plus story this morning from Adam Bender, Principal Engineer at Google. I always appreciate reading abt co's like Google and Microsoft with their parallel construction of what Staff-plus roles are, often incldng small people mgmt component, etc

Adam Bender - Principal Software Engineer at Google

Stories of folks reaching Staff Engineer roles.

staffeng.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

6 years

Over the last year or so I've written my first book, An Elegant Puzzle, which is my attempt to share what I've learned about engineering management.

Stripe Press

@stripepress

6 years

Two of our upcoming books are, at their hearts, about bringing people together and helping them thrive. An Elegant Puzzle (spring ‘19) focuses on engineering management & Get Together (summer ‘19) focuses on cultivating passionate communities. Learn more:

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Will Larson

@Lethain

3 years

Why do people angel invest? I get theory of angel investing as status building vehicle, but what are the other motivations? Especially for folks who do it before they are financially independent themselves? (Which seems increasingly common?) What do folks learn from the process?

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

Looking for examples of how engineering organizations measure their *impact*, what have you seen orgs do (good or bad)? E.g. according to lore, Amazon measures # of press releases; Square measures # of billable features; Uber measures # shipped features normalized by # eng; etc

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Will Larson

@Lethain

1 year

Wrote up some notes on the most frequent communication challenge I see folks have when communicating with executive, along with how to prevent it, "Extracting the Kernel."

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

Which brings us back to the main point, An Elegant Puzzle is available now!

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

www.amazon.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

What are your questions you'd want an engineering manager to answer? I'll answer any Qs here or on blog if they're too large!

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Will Larson

@Lethain

2 years

There's a lot of hate for micromanagers, but my experience is that when picking between a micromanaging exec and a disengaged exec, you should *always* prefer the micromanager. Some thoughts on how folks disengage, and how to stay engaged yourself Full at

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 months

Wrote some notes on using LLMs in products, and some guidelines to avoid some of the misleading mental models I hear some folks developing.

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Will Larson

@Lethain

2 years

Over past few weeks, I pulled together my notes on executive job/role searches, which I hope will help folks pursuing their first executive role avoid some of the common issues ("how do I find these roles?!", "what are single triggers?!").

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Will Larson

@Lethain

6 years

Folks aren't exactly banging down my door to ask for my list of most useful leadership/management books I've read, but I do get the question occasionally and have written up a bit of a list:

Book recommendations.

Folks occasionally ask me to recommend books to help them in their professional career.I can usually think of a couple recommendations in the moment, but always feel like I’m forgetting far more good...

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

From Staff Engineer proceeds so far, tonight was able to donate $1k to Resilient Coders (ty @ksylor ), $1k to Black Organizing Project (ty @podiana ) and $3k to /dev/color (ty @kasawill ). More to go soon (money moves so 🐌🐌🐌)

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Will Larson

@Lethain

2 years

For all the advice out there on managing your org’s compensation, the significant real and perceived compensation shifts from market, inflation, and geopolitical environments are truly mind bending over past two years. Haven’t spoken to anyone with a particularly clear plan.

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

Today is An Elegant Puzzle's release, and I'm exited to get to share it with y'all!

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

www.amazon.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

Excited to share @hazelcough 's path to the Payments Products Tech Lead role at @stripe . Michelle shares a bunch of tools she uses like her "top 3" doc of current priorities and using a decision log when she and her team designed Stripe Payment Intents.

Michelle Bu - Payments Products Tech Lead at Stripe

Stories of folks reaching Staff Engineer roles.

staffeng.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

3 years

Wrote a bit on one of the most unhelpful pieces of management advice that folks still get on the regular: trust your team!

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Will Larson

@Lethain

6 years

Wrote another systems modeling post on how limiting work-in-progress increases overall throughput. Increasingly suspect creating effective back pressure is _the_ core organizational design skill.

Why limiting work-in-progress works.

Several years ago, my friend Bobby showed me an article about a CEO who used systems thinking to understand their company’s bottlenecks, which eventually lead to him buying out his cofounder, who had...

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

2 years

Without committing the cardinal sin of engaging in "meetings discourse", I spent some time documenting the ~six meetings that I'd suggest most engineering organizations operate around. Also cover how to run them, how to scale them, etc Full notes at

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

I used to think the first episode of Battlestar Gallactica was brilliant to create a sense of dread by having its characters live in short explicit cycles of rest and flight. Now I realize the writers probably just had cared for an infant

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

I've been working with a large-ish startup that's revamping their incident response and incident program, and ended up writing up notes on some of the phases and challenges of creating and operating these programs. Some tips!

Incident response, programs and you(r startup).

During an incident at Digg, a coworker once quipped, “We serve funny cat pictures, who cares if we’re down for a little while?” If that’s your attitude towards reliability, then you probably don’t...

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

3 years

Have a draft of my "2021 year in review" up. Won't go out on mailing list for few weeks, def curious if anyone has thoughts.

2021 in review.

It’s always tricky to figure out the right tone for an annual wrapup post. This has been one of the best years of my life. Our son is now a walking toddler. I released my second book, Staff Engineer,...

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

7 years

Composing diverse teams and groups easily becomes second-shift work for URMs in your company. When we ask folks to participate, we become ethically obligated to ensure this work is shifted into the first-shift and recognized in performance reviews, promotions, etc.

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

Was recently poking around to find a tech writing community of folks who are semi-serious about the process (e.g. trying to write a book, build a ~monthly blogging habit, write for publications like Increment, etc), and couldn't find anything quite right

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Will Larson

@Lethain

7 years

What did *you* learn in 2017? (Also wrote all these up at )

Engineering management stuff I learned in 2017.

I’ve been working with Stripe’s infrastructure engineering team for 2017, getting to work an increasingly interesting set of problems, at an increasingly large scale, and with an increasingly...

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

💛 post from @brian_scanlan , esp agree on microservices being an anti-pattern for most companies. Fix the monolith first, then independently decide if you move to isolate processes. (Yes, it is possible to fix monolith... if you start early enough😅)

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

LetsEncrypt has got to be one of the most impressive projects in the last decade in terms of requiring (a) little upfront investment and (b) having a last, widespread impact on the quality of the entire internet. What are more projects like LetsEncrypt?

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Will Larson

@Lethain

6 years

Threw together some ideas on leading organizational change without authority (or in cases where consensus is hard to reach).

Model, document and share.

One of the trickiest, and most common, leadership scenarios is leading without authority, and I’ve written about one of the styles that I’ve found surprisingly effective in those conditions. I call...

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

I'd never heard of Eng Operations before a week ago and now I'm noticing the term everywhere. Nice post on Dropbox's approach

Bootstrapping Engineering Operations

Editor’s note: COVID-19 has had a dramatic impact on the way we live and work. This post was written just before these rapid changes took…

medium.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

3 years

Anyone have a link to a good blog post on using "decision logs" to track team/org decisions? (I've seen folks use the technique effectively, and looking for something I could share with others who have not.) (For some reason I thought @hazelcough had one, but cannot find.)

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

If you're unconvinced about starting intermittent fasting, you should be aware that it gives you an extra 1+ hours for doomscrolling every single day

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Will Larson

@Lethain

2 years

Finally got around to writing up an idea I've had in back of my mind for a few months: how do you learn to estimate disk space? IME, it's a particularly useful case of "back of envelope" estimation for architecture discussions, interviews, etc!

How to estimate disk space.

A few years ago while interviewing Nelson Elhage for Staff Engineer, he mentioned “estimation” as a particularly valuable skill. I hadn’t thought much about the idea of estimation as a skill, but his...

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

Stoked to have the physical copy of 97 Things Every EM Should Know arrive! ty @skamille for oppty to contribute, and grateful to be in book w/ @lara_hogan , @kthomas901 , @kstewart , @catehstn , @attackgecko , @buritica , @jyhsu , @randommood , @justzeros !

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Will Larson

@Lethain

2 years

Typed up the story of founding Uber SRE back in 2014. No advice, just memories of a very different era!

Founding Uber SRE.

This is my personal story of starting the SRE organization at Uber. If you want advice rather than reminiscence, take a look at Trunk and Branches Model and Productivity in the age of hypergrowth....

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

Would folks be willing to send me some of their conference CFP / "Call For Proposals" summaries for talks that were accepted? Want to collect a couple dozen into a blog post for folks who are looking for examples of accepted proposals to help them write their first

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

What are the most helpful resources you've found for being a CTO/VPE?

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Will Larson

@Lethain

3 years

Planning to spend some time in 2022 collecting folks' stories of infrastructure engineering along the lines of stories collected for Hope to do a few trial runs this week if anyone would be interested to spend an hour Zooming 10-12AM PT this Tue-Thurs

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Will Larson

@Lethain

2 years

Wrote up some notes on reading profit & loss statements, which are a surprisingly useful (often ignored!) tool for engineers and eng leadership to better understand the companies they work at, and also how engineering contributes revenue and expenses

Reading a Profit & Loss statement.

Some years ago, I was explaining to my manager that I was feeling a bit bored, and they told me to learn how to read a Profit & Loss (P&L) statement. At the time, that sounded suspiciously like,...

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

3 years

Systems thinking is my fav thinking tool, but many of my largest reasoning errors stemmed from surface use ("here's an intuitive mental model") while skipping the details ("comparing outputs of an explicit model against real behavior"). Some lessons!

How to safely think in systems.

While there are a decent number of folks out there modeling systems, there’s a much larger group of folks who think of themselves as systems thinkers but utilize techniques like modeling rather...

lethain.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

Hey folks! A lot of folks have recently asked me about small learning circles for senior leaders (CTO, VP Eng, Staff+/Principal Eng), and I'm thinking it would be ~easy~ to launch a few of these in SF/Bay. If you're interested, consider filling out

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

Apparently the Kindle version of An Elegant Puzzle will be on sale for $1.99 tomorrow if you're looking to score a cheaper copy! Now with 100 ratings, and just 10 days to its one year anniversary (I vow I only that know bc I just saw while getting link)

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Will Larson

@Lethain

7 years

In a scaling organization, the ability to be consistently aligned within and across teams is a marker of excellence. “Time to alignment” is your reorg success metric.

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

I'm thinking that now's the time for _me_ to pause sharing tech content until after the election. It can be helpful to have a choice to focus on reading something less overwhelming, but ultimately if there's ever a time in our lives in the US to be paying attention -- this is it.

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Will Larson

@Lethain

6 years

Was trying to figure out the right platform to teach a group of folks how to integrate with a specific API without getting bogged down in setting up the development environment, and wow, Glitch is _surprisingly good_, really amazed with what they've done.

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Will Larson

@Lethain

7 years

There is a surprisingly broad category of work where a single dedicated person saves person-years of rushed efforts later: ensuring systems are scaling (and not regressing), cost accounting, build tooling, code hosting, etc. Prefer two people, one is still the loneliest number.

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Will Larson

@Lethain

1 year

On vacation today, but next book is discoverable on the web: Will have something longer on this later or in next few days!

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

2019: wow, I need an app that notifies me when AQI is above 100 so I can stop exercising outside 2020: wow, I need an app that notifies me when AQI is below 100 so I know when I can leave the house

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 months

Audiobook for Engineering Exec's Primer available... tomorrow! Def got done much sooner than I anticipated, and now the book is 100% done 😍

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Will Larson

@Lethain

7 months

Sometimes "later this week" is actually tomorrow! Full digital version of Engineering Executive's Primer up on kindle/oreilly, and physical preorders open for March delivery.

The Engineering Executive's Primer: Impactful Technical Leadership

www.amazon.com

Will Larson

@Lethain

7 months

Engineering Executive’s primer is off to print!

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Will Larson

@Lethain

2 years

The future is here! (This repository never existed.)

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

Would any engineering leaders in SF area be interested in come chat with Stripe's engineering management team on any given Wednesday? Pretty casual format, good questions, strong sparkling water selection, etc.

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Will Larson

@Lethain

2 years

The #1 google docs feature I would be overjoyed by is export to markdown. I use a plugin for this now, but this feature is literally only reason I periodically consider moving to Dropbox paper

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1

81

Will Larson

@Lethain

7 years

Over the past year I've tried to get comfortable answering a question I often ask, "How do you build an inclusive team?" Some notes around work to move inclusion work into the first shift, including reworking how to assign key projects:

Inclusion in the first shift.

Several years and an employer ago, I was interviewing a candidate for an engineering management role and asked them how they built diverse teams. They mentioned the pipeline problem and concisely...

lethain.com

3

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

An Elegant Puzzle drops a week from today! In honor of that event, both the book and I did a photoshoot, which I failed, but the book did really well.

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Will Larson

@Lethain

7 years

I hope we can do more to emphasize that line management is a distinct job than managing managers. The skills are different, and line management is an extremely rich, deep field that we should celebrate more.

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6

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Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

If you’re considering taking up the clarinet during this quarantine period, kindly please reconsider. Signed, your neighbors working from home

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2

80

Will Larson

@Lethain

4 years

For StaffEng, recently added a piece about how to write engineering strategy, which I think is sort of directionally good but isn't quite working either. Any suggestions on how I should fix it?

Writing engineering strategy

Stories of folks reaching Staff Engineer roles.

staffeng.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

3 years

Quite excited for the Staff Engineer audiobook to be in the wild!

Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

www.amazon.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

So excited to have my talk from SRECon EMEA about investing in technical infrastructure up! This is ~everything I've learned over last six years leading infrastructure groups at Stripe and Uber.

SREcon19 Europe/Middle East/Africa - How Stripe Invests in Technical...

How Stripe Invests in Technical InfrastructureWill Larson, StripeDeciding what to work on is always difficult and is especially treacherous for folks working...

www.youtube.com

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Will Larson

@Lethain

5 years

Went down rabbit hole of @sriramk 's memos page, and it is a highly recommended rabbit-hole to fall down!

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Will Larson

@Lethain

3 years

Has anyone found a useful way to manage/maintain team and org charts? So they don't go stale in 2 months from new hires, team switches and so on? (Not worried about reorgs, those are discrete events, but orgs are never static things.) If your answer is "make a spreadsheet", no.

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